I don't think these moral claims originated in Hollywood. I think they're pretty typical of people in the American Northeast; people who have a lot of ancestry from the Quaker settlers.
> Consider Hollywood’s reaction to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Right after the war started, celebrities immediately called for a ceasefire. This fits with Hollywood morality. The October 7 attack was then in the past. While it was actually going on, sure, you could shoot back. But after the attack is over, a “good guy” would make peace at the first opportunity and trust the enemy to respect the ceasefire. No matter how many times they have attacked in the past, we can’t assume that they’re going to attack again. Maybe they will convert to being good guys. Maybe they will turn out to be decent people who are just misunderstood. That’s how things work in movies and TV shows, after all.
> I wonder to what extent the American left has exported lessons from TV and movies to the real world, and to what extent people were already going to think like this and Hollywood merely applied common delusions about the real world to fictional worlds.
I'm mostly rather left wing (although not American), including on this issue, and I think this a deeply uncharitable way of characterising the left with regard to the ongoing massacre of civilians in Palestine.
It may not be a straw man- there are some very irrational people in the world, and this may well fairly describe the views of some leftists- but it's certainly a weak man. I and many others have not uncritically imported our morality from Hollywood films, and my reasoning for condemning the actions of Israel is not that it is inherently immoral to retaliate or to preventively strike, but rather a consequentialist calculation that it cannot possibly be morally justified to kill tens of thousands of mostly innocent civilians to retaliate for the killing of around one thousand.
No belief about the Israel-Palestine conflict is as irrational as a maximally uncharitable interpretation of opposing views.
None of the celebrity statements in the article you linked to support your claim that Hollywood celebrities called for a ceasefire in Oct and Nov 2023 because they think it's morally impermissible to retaliate against a previous aggressor who is not currently aggressing. All but one of the quotes* allege disproportionate killing and wounding of innocent Palestinians—which presumably refers to Palestinians who were not involved in violent attacks on Israelis. You don't address proportionality in Hollywood morality at all in this post.
Ironically, if we use the Star Wars series as a proxy, Hollywood morality tells us that massive loss of civilian life is fine if it is collateral damage. Here's a discussion about how many civilians the good guys kill in the Star Wars movies, particularly by blowing up the Death Stars:
So, George Lucas was not consistent, and if anything, Star Wars could be used as a justification for killing a huge number of innocent civilians to neutralize a few bad people—the very opposite of what the Hollywood ceasefire advocates were saying.
*The one exception is Kehlani, whose quote in the article implies that Oct. 7 was an act of resistance against occupation and apartheid—but this also has nothing to do with your theorizing about Hollywood morality in this post.
> So, George Lucas was not consistent, and if anything, Star Wars could be used as a justification for killing a huge number of innocent civilians to neutralize a few bad people—the very opposite of what the Hollywood ceasefire advocates were saying.
Good point! Would the author feel it was fair for someone to write a substack post asking, therefore, "to what extent the American right has exported lessons from TV and movies to the real world" and calling his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict "deeply misguided" based on his imaginary embrace of this made-up principle that he didn't remotely espouse? If not, why does he think it's fair to do that to his opponents with regard to the idea that they think retaliation or preventive violence is never permissible?
Herman Wouk wrote a blockbuster, The Winds of War, about a naïvely optimistic German Jew who refused to escape the Nazis while he had the chance. I think that part of the mystique of the Second Striker is the action movie/Western hero who brushes off provocation, because he is so strong that he has no need to be afraid; thus extreme tolerance of threats is a sign of courage and strength. Every now and then the scriptwriters like to mix it up a little by letting the hero take a beating. Hubris much?
I think there’s validity in discouraging vigilanteism, ie super hero’s not taking the law into their own hands but allowing for due process but you’re mostly right, Hollywood morality sanitizes way too much, dividing the world into good and bad or, a favourite trope, always giving the bad guy another chance (probably coming from Christianity) whilst forgetting about the victims
This falls into the trap of thinking that extreme situations are the way we should construct morality.
In fact, we should construct our moral sense first on the most banal and everyday events.
For example, it is absolutely correct to find out why some has done something to upset you instead of immediately or even pre-emptively strike back. Seeking peace in personal relations makes for a better world for everyone.
The corollary is true as well, you can’t take personal morality and ethics and apply it cataclysmic and existential stories like the ones told by Hollywood. You’re right, it’s silly and doesn’t make sense.
In the end, you can’t really build a worldview on thought experiments, you have to build it by talking to people, learning about different ways of understanding our place here. It’s bad enough that we are all blind monks trying to describe an elephant, when you have monks trying to imagine an elephant without touching it, that’s when things get weird.
I strongly disagree. Thought experiments are so valuable precisely because thinking about everyday situations warps our intuitions. The human brain is not optimised for modelling the situations it encounters accurately; it's optimised for modelling them usefully in a practical sense.
Therefore we must take it out of this mode, and consider examples which test the shape and limits of principles in the abstract.
As you can see from this very long Wikipedia page, the ethics of extreme death are highly complex and debated. I hardly see how knowing the trolley problem could have swayed people’s decisions here.
On one hand you could have a group that says ‘kill one save six’ and another group that says ‘kill six instead of one to demonstrate power’.
The experiment was not created to expedite military decision making making, rather is was created to examine “the meta-problem of why different judgements are arrived at in particular instances.”
Remember that you disagreed with the idea that a worldview can’t be properly formed from the extreme, abstracted, scenarios of action adventure movies. Ethics, worldviews, moral centres need to come from a variety of sources, including conversations, books of wisdom, observations of animals, family stories. Sure extreme situations can be a part, I would argue a small part, but if it’s the main part, you end up being able to justify war crimes like Hiroshima and Gaza.
I don't understand your objection. Surely it's clear how our response to the trolley problem could inform a decision with regard to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, given how straightforwardly analogous it is to those situations?
How is it relevant that the ethics of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are complicated? Did you interpret me as suggesting that the trolley problem can only inform the solution to simple problems?
I'll bring you back to the original point. My critique is that Hollywood abstractions can't alone make a world view. That people make an error when they think there is a macrocosm in extreme events depicted on screen that can inform the microcosm of their lives.
Much happier to discuss that, but I will try address your questions.
I would say that no, your response to the trolley problem would not inform how you make choices around killing people. The reason why it's not informative is in the problem itself and why the problem is interesting.
You will remember that the original thought experiment was presented to investigate why people might make different choices in similar circumstances. It was presented as two options: in the first scenario your choice was to pull a switch to alter the outcome, the second option was to push a man and kill him to alter the outcome. Most people would do the first thing, but not the second. The outcome of this experiment showed both that people are less likely to do direct murders, but are better with indirect murders and also that small changes in a system can drastically affect the out come if there are humans involved.
As well, you don't have a body in the experiment, you have no idea what particular chemical concoction you would have in your brain at the time. Are you a fight, flight, freeze or fawn responder?
The relevance of the complexity of the problem shows how ineffective applying simplified abstractions to it. We are tactical creatures, and are often surprised by our responses to complex situations. We draw on a huge wealth of knowledge, loyalties, desires when we approach decision making in the real world. Although philosophical exercises might help frame your approach, I guarantee you will be weighing the happiness of your friends and family much higher than a previous response to an abstract question. If the abstract question is a primary consideration, you might have issues that can't be resolved in a comment section.
I didn't suggest that you thought it was the only solution, I suggested that it's consideration would be so low as to be non existent.
Let me add one more absurdity: Hollywood reinforces a concept of "honor among thieves", or a type of inner-group moral precedence. You see this whenever a villain betrays another villain within his social circle. That guy then becomes The True Villain and the "friends" that he wronged work with the heros to take him down.
It's not that this concept is original to Hollywood; it is genuinely grounded in common moral psychology and in how we do character judgments. Yet it obviously has no justification - murder is murder, regardless of who is murdered. Pushing a sense of forgiveness toward those who are parochially good doesn't really track with actual real-world evils: genocide, for instance, isn't usually the work of a lone psychopath, but rather many otherwise normal folk who have shrunken moral circles.
Of course, in Hollywood the evil enemy will just slip and fall off the cliff, sparing the hero from having to kill him. Similarly, we should expect the Hamas guys accidentally fall out of their windows, one by one.
As others have touched on, I think this is as much religious (not just Christian) as it is Hollywood. You act in the 'right' way, and the moral laws of the universe (God) will bail you out.
This seems to be a common lesson of various morality tales and is maybe necessary to spread belief in simple, universal rules that are net positive over having each individual carefully weigh each case before them (with lots of resources expended fact finding and arguing). To properly perform this role, stories need to embody the most extreme examples of deontological absolutism.
I think this probably also explains why there is so much dissonance sometimes with modern 'woke' storytelling (e.g. the villain is excused solely on account of having suffered / victim group membership). The logic of storytelling (at least as fables that instruct in proper values + behaviour) demands examples that are pushed to the extremes. However values have changed, and small changes are made to appear very obvious. In fact you could argue (I probably wouldn't) that recent craziness is overstated, and if we travelled backwards through time people would be shocked by the sudden change to overt 'unwoke' messaging in the early part of the 21st century.
I agree with your general point, but one example is entirely off.
The 100 is pretty strongly not Hollywood morality (till the last season, anyway).
For nearly the entire show... It doesn't formally take sides, but pretty conclusively normalizes defensive as well as utilitarian mass killings having all the major protagonists engage in them. It's arguably the most Right Wing young adult show of the century.
You've totally misremembered The 100's Murphy plot arc. Murphy is falsely accused of a murder in the community and they attempt to hang him. A child confesses to the murder while he's hanging and when he's cut down he demands that the child be executed, then chases after it at which point the child commits suicide. He is then exiled under penalty of death; (basically a death sentence under the conditions of the show); kidnapped and brutally tortured by enemy savages... flees them only to be nearly executed upon return.
His murders are purely retaliatory against those who had basically sentenced him to death; for trying to execute a cold-blooded murderer when everyone had whimped out.
--
Rehabilitating him under those circumstances is hardly hollywood morality as you describe it.
*Of course most Right Wing young adult show still means; lesbian girlboss fighters... and once again the ending of the final season is in fact maximally shitlib.
Great post.
I don't think these moral claims originated in Hollywood. I think they're pretty typical of people in the American Northeast; people who have a lot of ancestry from the Quaker settlers.
Oohhhhhhh is that where it's from... That kinda makes sense actually.
It’s bizarre how people like this could have conquered all of America and the Indians, whose culture had a much more realistic sense of danger.
Interesting! Didn't realize they were editing old scenes like that.
> Consider Hollywood’s reaction to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Right after the war started, celebrities immediately called for a ceasefire. This fits with Hollywood morality. The October 7 attack was then in the past. While it was actually going on, sure, you could shoot back. But after the attack is over, a “good guy” would make peace at the first opportunity and trust the enemy to respect the ceasefire. No matter how many times they have attacked in the past, we can’t assume that they’re going to attack again. Maybe they will convert to being good guys. Maybe they will turn out to be decent people who are just misunderstood. That’s how things work in movies and TV shows, after all.
> I wonder to what extent the American left has exported lessons from TV and movies to the real world, and to what extent people were already going to think like this and Hollywood merely applied common delusions about the real world to fictional worlds.
I'm mostly rather left wing (although not American), including on this issue, and I think this a deeply uncharitable way of characterising the left with regard to the ongoing massacre of civilians in Palestine.
It may not be a straw man- there are some very irrational people in the world, and this may well fairly describe the views of some leftists- but it's certainly a weak man. I and many others have not uncritically imported our morality from Hollywood films, and my reasoning for condemning the actions of Israel is not that it is inherently immoral to retaliate or to preventively strike, but rather a consequentialist calculation that it cannot possibly be morally justified to kill tens of thousands of mostly innocent civilians to retaliate for the killing of around one thousand.
No belief about the Israel-Palestine conflict is as irrational as a maximally uncharitable interpretation of opposing views.
None of the celebrity statements in the article you linked to support your claim that Hollywood celebrities called for a ceasefire in Oct and Nov 2023 because they think it's morally impermissible to retaliate against a previous aggressor who is not currently aggressing. All but one of the quotes* allege disproportionate killing and wounding of innocent Palestinians—which presumably refers to Palestinians who were not involved in violent attacks on Israelis. You don't address proportionality in Hollywood morality at all in this post.
Ironically, if we use the Star Wars series as a proxy, Hollywood morality tells us that massive loss of civilian life is fine if it is collateral damage. Here's a discussion about how many civilians the good guys kill in the Star Wars movies, particularly by blowing up the Death Stars:
https://screenrant.com/star-wars-death-star-destroyed-deaths/
So, George Lucas was not consistent, and if anything, Star Wars could be used as a justification for killing a huge number of innocent civilians to neutralize a few bad people—the very opposite of what the Hollywood ceasefire advocates were saying.
*The one exception is Kehlani, whose quote in the article implies that Oct. 7 was an act of resistance against occupation and apartheid—but this also has nothing to do with your theorizing about Hollywood morality in this post.
> So, George Lucas was not consistent, and if anything, Star Wars could be used as a justification for killing a huge number of innocent civilians to neutralize a few bad people—the very opposite of what the Hollywood ceasefire advocates were saying.
Good point! Would the author feel it was fair for someone to write a substack post asking, therefore, "to what extent the American right has exported lessons from TV and movies to the real world" and calling his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict "deeply misguided" based on his imaginary embrace of this made-up principle that he didn't remotely espouse? If not, why does he think it's fair to do that to his opponents with regard to the idea that they think retaliation or preventive violence is never permissible?
Herman Wouk wrote a blockbuster, The Winds of War, about a naïvely optimistic German Jew who refused to escape the Nazis while he had the chance. I think that part of the mystique of the Second Striker is the action movie/Western hero who brushes off provocation, because he is so strong that he has no need to be afraid; thus extreme tolerance of threats is a sign of courage and strength. Every now and then the scriptwriters like to mix it up a little by letting the hero take a beating. Hubris much?
I think there’s validity in discouraging vigilanteism, ie super hero’s not taking the law into their own hands but allowing for due process but you’re mostly right, Hollywood morality sanitizes way too much, dividing the world into good and bad or, a favourite trope, always giving the bad guy another chance (probably coming from Christianity) whilst forgetting about the victims
This falls into the trap of thinking that extreme situations are the way we should construct morality.
In fact, we should construct our moral sense first on the most banal and everyday events.
For example, it is absolutely correct to find out why some has done something to upset you instead of immediately or even pre-emptively strike back. Seeking peace in personal relations makes for a better world for everyone.
The corollary is true as well, you can’t take personal morality and ethics and apply it cataclysmic and existential stories like the ones told by Hollywood. You’re right, it’s silly and doesn’t make sense.
In the end, you can’t really build a worldview on thought experiments, you have to build it by talking to people, learning about different ways of understanding our place here. It’s bad enough that we are all blind monks trying to describe an elephant, when you have monks trying to imagine an elephant without touching it, that’s when things get weird.
I strongly disagree. Thought experiments are so valuable precisely because thinking about everyday situations warps our intuitions. The human brain is not optimised for modelling the situations it encounters accurately; it's optimised for modelling them usefully in a practical sense.
Therefore we must take it out of this mode, and consider examples which test the shape and limits of principles in the abstract.
Absolutely agree that it’s good to understand how the brain works and that thought experiments help us do that.
Can you give an example of real world example of an ethical decision that would be directly informed by the trolley problem?
The decision to bomb Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Gaza, etc. are some of the clearest real-world examples of such ethical dilemmas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
As you can see from this very long Wikipedia page, the ethics of extreme death are highly complex and debated. I hardly see how knowing the trolley problem could have swayed people’s decisions here.
On one hand you could have a group that says ‘kill one save six’ and another group that says ‘kill six instead of one to demonstrate power’.
The experiment was not created to expedite military decision making making, rather is was created to examine “the meta-problem of why different judgements are arrived at in particular instances.”
Remember that you disagreed with the idea that a worldview can’t be properly formed from the extreme, abstracted, scenarios of action adventure movies. Ethics, worldviews, moral centres need to come from a variety of sources, including conversations, books of wisdom, observations of animals, family stories. Sure extreme situations can be a part, I would argue a small part, but if it’s the main part, you end up being able to justify war crimes like Hiroshima and Gaza.
I don't understand your objection. Surely it's clear how our response to the trolley problem could inform a decision with regard to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, given how straightforwardly analogous it is to those situations?
How is it relevant that the ethics of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are complicated? Did you interpret me as suggesting that the trolley problem can only inform the solution to simple problems?
I'll bring you back to the original point. My critique is that Hollywood abstractions can't alone make a world view. That people make an error when they think there is a macrocosm in extreme events depicted on screen that can inform the microcosm of their lives.
Much happier to discuss that, but I will try address your questions.
I would say that no, your response to the trolley problem would not inform how you make choices around killing people. The reason why it's not informative is in the problem itself and why the problem is interesting.
You will remember that the original thought experiment was presented to investigate why people might make different choices in similar circumstances. It was presented as two options: in the first scenario your choice was to pull a switch to alter the outcome, the second option was to push a man and kill him to alter the outcome. Most people would do the first thing, but not the second. The outcome of this experiment showed both that people are less likely to do direct murders, but are better with indirect murders and also that small changes in a system can drastically affect the out come if there are humans involved.
As well, you don't have a body in the experiment, you have no idea what particular chemical concoction you would have in your brain at the time. Are you a fight, flight, freeze or fawn responder?
The relevance of the complexity of the problem shows how ineffective applying simplified abstractions to it. We are tactical creatures, and are often surprised by our responses to complex situations. We draw on a huge wealth of knowledge, loyalties, desires when we approach decision making in the real world. Although philosophical exercises might help frame your approach, I guarantee you will be weighing the happiness of your friends and family much higher than a previous response to an abstract question. If the abstract question is a primary consideration, you might have issues that can't be resolved in a comment section.
I didn't suggest that you thought it was the only solution, I suggested that it's consideration would be so low as to be non existent.
Quick explainer of the problem https://youtu.be/bOpf6KcWYyw
Let me add one more absurdity: Hollywood reinforces a concept of "honor among thieves", or a type of inner-group moral precedence. You see this whenever a villain betrays another villain within his social circle. That guy then becomes The True Villain and the "friends" that he wronged work with the heros to take him down.
It's not that this concept is original to Hollywood; it is genuinely grounded in common moral psychology and in how we do character judgments. Yet it obviously has no justification - murder is murder, regardless of who is murdered. Pushing a sense of forgiveness toward those who are parochially good doesn't really track with actual real-world evils: genocide, for instance, isn't usually the work of a lone psychopath, but rather many otherwise normal folk who have shrunken moral circles.
Of course, in Hollywood the evil enemy will just slip and fall off the cliff, sparing the hero from having to kill him. Similarly, we should expect the Hamas guys accidentally fall out of their windows, one by one.
But sending “Hugh” back to the collective worked as a mind virus, shown when he reappears in “Datalore”.
Lmao this is completely moronic
As others have touched on, I think this is as much religious (not just Christian) as it is Hollywood. You act in the 'right' way, and the moral laws of the universe (God) will bail you out.
This seems to be a common lesson of various morality tales and is maybe necessary to spread belief in simple, universal rules that are net positive over having each individual carefully weigh each case before them (with lots of resources expended fact finding and arguing). To properly perform this role, stories need to embody the most extreme examples of deontological absolutism.
I think this probably also explains why there is so much dissonance sometimes with modern 'woke' storytelling (e.g. the villain is excused solely on account of having suffered / victim group membership). The logic of storytelling (at least as fables that instruct in proper values + behaviour) demands examples that are pushed to the extremes. However values have changed, and small changes are made to appear very obvious. In fact you could argue (I probably wouldn't) that recent craziness is overstated, and if we travelled backwards through time people would be shocked by the sudden change to overt 'unwoke' messaging in the early part of the 21st century.
> (e.g. the villain is excused solely on account of having suffered / victim group membership)
What are some examples of the latter? I don't think I've ever seen that in any fictional medium.
I agree with your general point, but one example is entirely off.
The 100 is pretty strongly not Hollywood morality (till the last season, anyway).
For nearly the entire show... It doesn't formally take sides, but pretty conclusively normalizes defensive as well as utilitarian mass killings having all the major protagonists engage in them. It's arguably the most Right Wing young adult show of the century.
You've totally misremembered The 100's Murphy plot arc. Murphy is falsely accused of a murder in the community and they attempt to hang him. A child confesses to the murder while he's hanging and when he's cut down he demands that the child be executed, then chases after it at which point the child commits suicide. He is then exiled under penalty of death; (basically a death sentence under the conditions of the show); kidnapped and brutally tortured by enemy savages... flees them only to be nearly executed upon return.
His murders are purely retaliatory against those who had basically sentenced him to death; for trying to execute a cold-blooded murderer when everyone had whimped out.
--
Rehabilitating him under those circumstances is hardly hollywood morality as you describe it.
*Of course most Right Wing young adult show still means; lesbian girlboss fighters... and once again the ending of the final season is in fact maximally shitlib.
Powerful post! This is what substack is for! Keep it up!